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The Other Sides of Billy Joel: Six Case Studies Revealing the Sociologist, the Balladeer, and the Historian

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The Other Sides of Billy Joel: Six Case Studies Revealing the Sociologist, the Balladeer, and the Historian Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 10-25-2011 12:00 AM The Other Sides of Billy Joel: Six Case Studies Revealing the Sociologist, the Balladeer, and the Historian A. Morgan Jones The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. James Grier The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Music A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © A. Morgan Jones 2011 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Musicology Commons Recommended Citation Jones, A. Morgan, "The Other Sides of Billy Joel: Six Case Studies Revealing the Sociologist, the Balladeer, and the Historian" (2011). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 300. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/300 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE OTHER SIDES OF BILLY JOEL: SIX CASE STUDIES REVEALING THE SOCIOLOGIST, THE BALLADEER, AND THE HISTORIAN (Spine title: The Other Sides of Billy Joel: Six Case Studies) (Thesis format: Monograph) by A. Morgan Jones Graduate Program in Musicology A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © A. Morgan Jones 2011 THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION Supervisor Examiners ______________________________ ______________________________ Dr. James Grier Dr. John Cuciurean Supervisory Committee ______________________________ Dr. Peter Franck ______________________________ Dr. Jay Hodgson ______________________________ Dr. Keir Keightley ______________________________ Dr. Walter Everett The thesis by Andrew Morgan Jones entitled: THE OTHER SIDES OF BILLY JOEL: SIX CASE STUDIES REVEALING THE SOCIOLOGIST, THE BALLADEER, AND THE HISTORIAN is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ______________________ _______________________________ Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board ii Abstract The failure of music critics to recognize Billy Joel’s tendency towards writing songs about issues such as the Vietnam War, the Cold War, struggling American industries and the effect of mass media on popular culture, particularly on two albums, The Nylon Curtain and Storm Front, has led to a pronounced lacuna in serious scholarship on Joel and his music. Relegated to adult contemporary radio stations due to the success of romantic pop ballads such as “Just the Way You Are” and derided as a drunken egomaniac by many reviewers, Joel has thus far been largely ignored by the academic world. The greater part of Joel’s oeuvre supports these assumptions, as the majority of his creative output focuses on his personal life, both romantic and professional. Careful analysis of six songs, however, three from each of the aforementioned albums (“Pressure,” “Goodnight Saigon,” and “Allentown” from The Nylon Curtain and “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” “Leningrad,” and “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’” from Storm Front) reveal Joel, for perhaps the only times in his lengthy career, placing the priorities and needs of his audience before his own. The result is a pair of albums (and three pairs of songs) that stands out from the remainder of his output in terms of social relevance. In these six songs, Joel adopted new roles, roles that he had previously eschewed. In “Pressure” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Joel becomes a sociologist, commenting on the societal effects of pop culture. “Goodnight Saigon” and “Leningrad” address the two great wars of Joel’s lifetime, the Vietnam War and the Cold War, while “Allentown” and “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’” provide narratives on the decline of the Pennsylvania steel industry and the North Atlantic fishery, respectively. Joel’s evolution as both a songwriter and a global citizen becomes apparent through close examination of these six songs and the albums on which they appear, and their respective videos, revealing Joel’s songwriting powers at their peak and his groundbreaking approach to the art of video-making. iii Keywords: Billy Joel, rock & roll, songwriting, music videos, MTV, Vietnam War, Cold War, steel industry, North Atlantic fisheries iv Table of Contents Title Page ................................................................................. i Certificate of Examination ..................................................... ii Abstract and Keywords ......................................................... iii Table of Contents ................................................................... v List of Appendices ................................................................. vi Preface .................................................................................. vii A Biographical Sketch ............................................................ 1 “Pressure” ............................................................................ 29 “We Didn’t Start the Fire” ................................................... 58 “Goodnight Saigon” ............................................................. 88 “Leningrad” ........................................................................ 113 “Allentown” ........................................................................ 149 “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’” ................................................... 172 Joel’s Final Albums; Conclusions ...................................... 195 Bibliography ....................................................................... 219 Appendices ......................................................................... 226 Curriculum Vitae ............................................................... 234 v List of Appendices Appendix A: Lyrics ............................................................ 226 Appendix B: Billy Joel Albums .......................................... 232 Appendix C: Track Listings ............................................... 233 vi Preface When he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on 15 March 1999, after he thanked his band members, his mother and daughter and girlfriend, and his bosses at Columbia Records, Billy Joel, in the direct manner for which he has been known throughout his extensive career, addressed his numerous critics head-on: “I know I’ve been referred to as derivative. Well, I’m damn guilty. I’m derivative as hell!” 1 For most of his career, which began in the late 1960s but did not get off the ground until his second solo album, Piano Man (1973), Joel has endured a reputation for writing music that copied (at best) or lampooned (at worst) his heroes and contemporaries, such as the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The writers of Rolling Stone magazine in particular seemed to enjoy panning Joel’s efforts, despite the fact that his records consistently charted high on the Billboard Hot 100 (three number 1 hit singles and thirty-three in the Top 40) and sold extremely well (Joel is the sixth-highest selling artist all-time in the United States and has sold over 150 million albums worldwide according to the Recording Industry Association of America). 2 One particularly scathing review appeared in 1980, after Joel released Glass Houses. In Rolling Stone, Paul Nelson took almost gleeful pleasure in exposing the irony that the song that would become Joel’s first number 1 hit, “It’s Still Rock ’n Roll to Me,” was hardly rock ’n roll at all, but more “cocktail-lounge piano man.” 3 Nelson continued by accusing Joel of copying the Rolling Stones on “You May Be Right,” Paul Simon (“Don’t Ask Me Why”), the Beatles (“All for Leyna”) and the Eagles (“Close to the Borderline”). Nelson, however, unwittingly recognized Joel’s efforts at writing 1 Billy Joel. “Billy Joel Accepts His Induction,” rockhall.com. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, n.p. Web. 31 May 2011. 2 “Top Selling Artists.” www.riaa.com. Recording Industry Association of America, n.d. Web. 16 May 2011. 3 Paul Nelson. “Billy Joel: Glass Houses,” www.rollingstone.com. Rolling Stone magazine, 1 May 1980. Web. 30 May 2011. vii something new with this album; he writes of “Billy Joel’s all-out attempt at a rock & roll album” and how Joel should “fess up, forget about being a rock & roller and settle down in the middle of the road.”4 In so doing, Nelson alludes to the fact that, until this point, very little in Joel’s catalogue could truly have been considered rock & roll. He had been labeled “pop pastiche” by Stephen Holden in his review of 52nd Street in Rolling Stone; Holden went so far as to call Joel “vaudevillian” and a mimic who “has the grasp of rock and the technical know- how to be able to caricature Bob Dylan and the Beatles … and an updated Anthony Newley … all in the same Las Vegas format.”5 In these two reviews, Nelson and Holden paint a picture of an artist who relied on flash and dazzle to entertain crowds; Nelson calls Joel “a lounge lizard, whipping himself into an artificial frenzy,”6 while Holden labels him a “bantam, hyperkinetic Rocky Balboa onstage,” working his audiences “into a lather of adulation with the snappy calculation of borsch-belt ham.”7 Although their rhetoric may have been somewhat vitriolic, the view of Joel held by Nelson and Holden (and other reviewers
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